Bryant started Colossus Chess in 1983, using his White Knight Mk 11 program,[4] winner of the 1983 European Microcomputer Chess Championship,[17] as a basis. It was developed on an Apple II, but was first commercially released for Commodore 64 as Colossus Chess 2.0 (CDS Micro Systems, 1984). A number of releases for 8-bit microcomputers followed. Version 3.0 was released in 1984 for the Atari 8-bit family of computers (published by English Software), followed by 4.0 in 1985 which was released on most formats of the day (published by CDS). Per other games of the time, the Acorn Electron implementation required that part of the screen memory be used as working space, causing the lower half of the screen to contain 'garbled' patterns.

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The program was subsequently ported to Atari ST (1988), Amiga (1989) and IBM PC (1990) under the title Colossus Chess X. The new releases featured four chess sets[19] and enhanced graphics developed with the assistance of Gary Thomlinson and Carl Cropley.[4] The opening book was extended to 11,000 positions, and the program had the ability to learn from past playing experiences.[19]

No work was done on Colossus Chess from 1991 to 2005, when Martin Bryant created a completely new and freely available Windows version conforming to the Universal Chess Interface.[20] It was written in C#, then converted to C for speed, and was finally publicly released in 2006.[20] As of January 2009[update], the latest version is 2008b.[20]